Floral gloom and worn-out folk: the Tusen År Under Jord interview
A conversation with D. Jonsson aka Hortognome, the creative force behind Swedish DIY tape label Hibiskofon and cult underground music projects Tusen År Under Jord & Dusa.
My mother and father then lived in Handöl, a small mining village in the outmost regions of southern Norrland. It was by the foot of the mountains, surrounded by water and forest, and with the Norwegian border some twenty kilometres due west.
D. Jonsson, also known by his pseudonym Hortognome, was born in 1978 to Swedish parents living in a small mining village called Handöl. 148 kilometres away from Östersund. 333 kilometres away from Sundsvall. 594 kilometres away from Uppsala. 660 kilometres away from Stockholm. If a place this remote doesn’t shape your outlook on life – and possibly anything larger than that as well – I don’t what will.
We moved eastward when I was around three years old, to a small town of then about 40,000 people. My father kept working in Handöl, so I managed to weekends and summer there for another year and a half or so. By the time I was five he had left his job and moved into town permanently. From our house we could still view the mountains beyond the great lake that flanked the town.
However, the sudden change in the environment didn’t really align with Jonsson’s idea of home. Although he calls it small, a town that size is fairly big for Swedish standards. Stockholm is the only legitimate metropolis in all of Sweden, with its inhabitants exceeding one million. It’s followed by Göteborg and other cities like Malmö and Uppsala, but most urban areas in the country clock in at less than 50,000 souls. The region where Handöl is located, Jämtland Iän, counts a little more than 30,000.
I felt as if I was being ripped from a genuine coherency and thrown into something completely different. I viewed it as a betrayal on behalf of my parents and I’ve longed for home ever since.
That sense of longing for home is one of the things that eventually led Hortognome towards paving his own artistic path. The work he’s done with his label Hibiskofon, while inherently connected to themes of nature and folk-rooted doom and gloom, is also expressive of his need for an art form that he could related to and that still didn’t exist at the time. This aspect acts as the ‘leitmotiv’ that connects all the releases under its belt, especially from a conceptual and visual standpoint.
My ambitions with Hibiskofon are, or rather were, to release music that is close to both the aesthetic and mood that most my own music dwells within and to the qualities I seek out in other people’s music. My work tends is the result of a mix of collage, artifacts, folk and gloom, so it was natural for all those elements to shape the sound of Hibiskofon, which I feel in part is diverse as well as strangely consistent. On the other hand, I also felt the need to keep everything close and not work outside a circle of friends and like-minded people whom I knew to produce top notch material. In short, I wanted to create a label that I myself would’ve wanted to discover and delve into. Things had to be done thoroughly and with the highest of ambitions, hence things must be allowed to come to fruition in its own pace. Time should not be an intruding factor when examining quality and your position in regard to the goals set: I wanted it to be top notch and with a voice of its own. I’d say I came a little more than halfway there.
Speaking of visuals, it goes without saying that you put a considerable amount of effort when it comes to presenting your label’s work to the public and I guess it’s safe to say that this approach you have when it comes to the packaging of any Hibiskofon release is deliberate.
The artwork must be at least as good as the music it supports. Also, if the music has an old, worn-out or obscure sound quality I think it’s important that such characteristics are also reflected in the method of printing and in the material of the packaging itself. It is hard to find a print shop that works on uneven, uncoated and rough paper, and it is hard to get that faded look in an inkjet printer. Risography or stamps or an old photocopier work much better if you are after that aged look. This is also why I chose to make physical newsletters, written in both English and Swedish and elaborately laid out and printed. Sending them via traditional mail to keep customers and other interested people updated was highly satisfying.
Something quite natural I would say as I was dealing with actual physical products. If your releases are exclusively digital downloads or streaming I think so much get lost in promotion via e-mail, forums or other digital means. The impression I got was that the people receiving my mails felt pretty much the same.
Hibiskofon officially started in 2013 with the release of a tape called ‘Segermännen’ by Dusa, a project of Jonsson’s. He describes the music as “mourning folk from Segerhuva’s funeral feast ‘Sweetness Overdue’”.
Segerhuva was a Swedish record label run by a couple of friends of mine. I had promised to provide them with enough material to make a Dusa LP, but that record never materialised, as I do tend to take my time when it comes to creating art. The label eventually disbanded in late 2010 and in early spring of 2012 they held some kind of farewell party called Sweetness Overdue, a reference to a compilation CD they had released eight years earlier, at the legendary experimental venue Fylkingen in Stockholm. I was invited to play a set during the evening, and Segermännen was composed specifically for that occasion. The piece itself contains a handful of old speech samples, rearranged to reference the people behind the the label and to illustrate the death of the label while also hinting at the dawn of new projects that my friends had been working after Segerhuva. As it was performed at the event which marked the final laying to rest of the label, the funeral and mourning themes around the tape felt natural.
When it comes to the music I still think it’s quite brilliant. From a strictly musical standpoint I probably rank it as one of the more complex and ornate pieces I’ve managed to produce, and while listening to it more than a decade later makes me think of a few details and transitions that I would’ve handled differently, it’s still quite a solid work.
“For as long as I can remember there’s been a sort of nostalgia lingering among the very foundation of my psyche and occasionally, when triggered by the right aesthetics, vista or themes, it comes forth like a force of its own”
The release of the Dusa tape marked the start of Hibiskofon, but it still didn’t quite manage to make that much of a impact on the relatively small scene that the label found itself lurking within, at the intersection of experimental music and folk with hints of ambient tones and black metal atmospheres. That would only happen later in the same year with the release of ‘Sorgsendömets Fobos’ by Tusen År Under Jord, quite possibly the label’s most successful release.
Like Dusa, Tusen År Under Jord is spearheaded by Jonsson, and its debut record seems to be the most likable piece of music he’s produced so far. Quite an achievement if you consider that it all started as nothing more than a side project.
[Sorgsendömet] seems to be the most instantly likable piece of music I’ve produced. There’s something about it that seem to have a wide and lasting appeal on a lot of otherwise pretty disparate groups of people. The funny thing is that it all started with a pile of musical drafts I found too good to be thrown away, but too simple or generic to be incorporated into the music of Dusa. The work I do as Dusa is more like a personal journey trying to find or come to terms with the geography of a home once lost. It’s very conceptual. calculated and personal. On the other hand, Tusen År Under Jord dwells among exotic, made up places I sort of travel to as a tourist. Just dreaming it up as I go jazzin’ about in this foreign terrain. It’s more intuitive. So while dusa is more reflective of my person and past, Tusen År Under Jord is more of a playground with less defined borders and rules.
I began working on them more elaborately, though without the direction or path I usually try to find before starting to work on new music. I’d say I was more than halfway through composing and arranging the material before some kind of coherency or story started to emerge among the pieces. Soon after that, the title of the album and the name of the project came to me, things started to really fall into place and while mixing I started to realize that something quite special was being created.
It wasn’t an easy process by any means. While Dusa may be a beast of its own kind, Tusen År Under Jord is still an extremely original project, from a musical, visual and conceptual standpoint. Coming to terms with the idea that something completely new was being created wasn’t – and never really is – immediate.
I still had a lot of doubts about the material I had come up with as well as the title and name of the project. I remember sitting with friends rambling on the topic and trying to argument for and justify my choice of words. Nobody had told me I was on the wrong path. I just had to process my fear of diminishing the music by placing words in front of it who were too weak.
It’s safe to say that the hard work paid off in the end though, isn’t it? As far as I know the tape was fairly successful and receive nothing but praise from anybody who had the chance to listen to it when it first came out.
As the tape were released there were nothing but supportive feedback and words of awe, nobody clamped down on the semantics. Judging by the reception the two projects get I guess my rigid personality is less interesting than my fanciful dreams and I see this as a lesson to keep in mind: be more relaxed and play along to life’s inherent melody.
One aspect of Sorgsendömets Fobos that I remember caught my attention are the sampling approach and the sound of the recording. There’s a distinct classical tone and the whole recording is rife with vinyl crackles and dust. Was the choice of going for this sort of sound a deliberate choice? And I do wonder what gear you used to record the album as well.
I have trodden this dusty and dirty path for about 25 years now and of course it is driven by an intent, mainly with the goal of satisfying my own longing toward times past. For as long as I can remember there’s been a sort of nostalgia lingering among the very foundation of my psyche and occasionally, when triggered by the right aesthetics, vista or themes, it comes forth like a force of its own. One of these triggers is music. As a child it was mainly my mother’s record collection that would let me glimpse through peculiar windows into the past. Albeit no more than a perspective of a mere decade or two, it was more than enough to taste the lively and textured sounds of the ‘70s. Much of the music contrasted intensely against the glossy sterility that covered mainstream culture for a child in the ‘80s.
“I started to actively infuse the parts of my own music which lacked inherently noisy samples with extra hiss and crackle. I tried minutely cutting out sounds to evoke the feeling of faulty wiring. Carefully micro-shifting notes in time as well as using pitch to create tension and sway”
Closing in on the ‘90s I was exposed to hip hop and understood that a gramophone and its output could be used as an instrument. This was something that fascinated me deeply, although I couldn’t really comprehend what was happening and how those grainy snippets of blatantly non-contemporary recordings made it into the music. About ten years later I bought my first sampler trying to get a grasp of the process.
And then came the 2000s. If the 80s were characterized by a kind of music that often felt way too cheerful on one hand and decidedly way too calculated on the other, mostly thanks to market-tested business strategies and a constant rehash of ideas that had already been seen before time and time again, then one the single greatest achievements of the turn of the millennium was to bring that kind of music back with a vengeance.
It all took a turn around 1998. Music entered the age of retro pastiche. Blurring the musical then and the musical now by sampling was out of time. Rearranging and blending eras and genres was not interesting anymore. Copying old music, old production techniques and old hairstyles were suddenly the way forward. Once again, I found myself in the barren sterility of 80s anemic pop music. Totally stripped of groove, harmonies and eventually even melody.
This discrepancy between Hortognome’s idea of music and what the mainstream had to offer eventually lead him towards developing the decrepit, nostalgic and obsessively, meticulously produced sound that’s synonymous with the Tusen År Under Jord debut tape and other works of his such as the Ljung LP by Dusa – give that one a listen!
I started to actively infuse the parts of my own music which lacked inherently noisy samples with extra hiss and crackle. I tried minutely cutting out sounds to evoke the feeling of faulty wiring. Carefully micro-shifting notes in time as well as using pitch to create tension and sway. Ever since then I’ve tried to perfect and lend natural balance to these techniques of adding noise, texture and seemingly random interference into the music. [Sorgsendömet] is no exception to that ambition.
That also meant making sure you used the right equipment when creating the actual music, right? I can’t imagine recording ‘Sorgsendömet Fobos’ or ‘Segermännen’ on modern, top-of-the-line equipment or through software like Cubase.
No special equipment was used during the making of Sorgsendömet. It was composed and arranged in a hardware combined sampler and sequencer. Getting the sounds I wanted by a careful choice and combination of source samples, filtered and layered meticulously. I might have been helped by the fact that I some year before had bought a few moving crates of old 78 RPM shellac records. I had harvested them all for useful samples and quite a few showed up in Sorgsendömet. Apart from the music on those discs sound older by merit of age alone, there is also significantly more surface noise on these shellacs than on vinyl. When the songs were mixed and ready I layered parts of them with an old string machine just to add to the already thick atmospheres.
One thing that was a bit unusual for me was the amount of phaser effect I used while mixing. I had a vision of a kind of hollowed out, swirly space sound at the core of the music. I have not listened to much cosmic kraut music in my days, but I have a very specific idea how I want that genre to sound. I had two old DDR manufactured phasers that were put in hard work in trying to sculpt the sound I wanted. I came reasonably close I would say.
After Sorgsendömets Fobos came Själablomster, a compilation tape presenting an extensive selection of material by a number of key players from the experimental underground music movement in Sweden, ranging from Wagner Ӧdegård with his project Semilanceata, to Viktor Ottosson (Ättestupa, Blodvite) with his project Krökta Rum, to Kristian Olsson (Heid, Poena, Styggelse & Bolvärk). From a conceptual standpoint, the tape revolves around botanist themes with a heavy focus on tone and sound, something which keeps it in line with the label’s shtick.
The name Hibiskofon in itself hints of the vegetation fascination I’ve carried along all my life. This is also something that stems from my mother’s lineage, from my grandparents farming and gardening to my mother’s boiling plant brews for textile colouring and her love for wildflowers. I myself have always longed for the sparse, near mountainous vegetation of my childhood. Ferns, low shrubberies and bent old birches. Heathlands and bogs carrying bizarre and delicious berries. The folklore around and medical use of plants and herbs is something that has always mesmerized me.
“Själablomster” was ultimately Hortognome’s attempt to get a glimpse of how themes of inner vegetation and florality would be expressed by a handful of people whose musical output he respects and appreciates deeply.
I contacted the artist that I wanted to participate in this project, presented the concept along with some hopefully inspirational and poetic musings and a few rules regarding musical execution and titling. Everyone was keen on the idea and I sat back and started figuring out the packaging and artwork while awaiting everyone sending me their material. I think I managed to ask the right people to join the project, as the compilation turned out very nice and surprisingly uniform to my ears.
During that same year, you also released a tape called ‘Tre’ by Erik Aschan. This is the only Hibiskofon publication that I think can be regarded as purely folk in tone and atmosphere, Erik is a bona fide old-school folk musician and it shows. What was the impetus that led you to deciding that it was worth it to give these recordings a chance and releasing them?
Erik Aschan is one of Sweden’s hidden gems, he’s been active since the early 70s, almost exclusively producing and releasing his music within a strict do it yourself ethos. Several of his early albums are masterpieces through and through and his approach to songwriting and especially lyricism is both original and highly evolved. The life he’s led is as fascinating as his music and worthy of the work that a proper biographer could do. Around the year 2000 me and a friend travelled south and seeked Erik out. Even though he’d been in some kind of creative hibernation for the past 15 years, our meeting resulted in me financing and distributed a reissue of his debut LP from 1973. We kept collaborating and the recordings released via Hibiskofon were done in early autumn, 2003. I had brought a portable, minimal recording setup to Erik’s small cabin. We sat opposite each other by the kitchen table him playing and me operating the tape recorder. Quite the moment in hindsight. Erik planned to use these recordings as basic tracks for a new album, but nothing ever came of that and the tape just ended up in my archive.
At some point, Hortognome and Erik lost contact with each other due to a handful of reasons and any collaboration between the two would be consequently discontinued. Things fell silent until the former offered the latter to release the demo recordings from 2003 in exchange for economic compensation.
He accepted my offer as he was in dire need of money. He actually began his reply by asking me for a 1600 Euro loan to get him out of some trouble with the local authorities. As I said, quite the character.
Would you say that ‘Tre’ still holds up, now that it’s been almost 20 years since the initial recording session took place?
The tape is somewhat singular in the Hibiskofonic flowerbed, but it stand it’s ground. I would probably liked it even more if it was not for my personal history of tangles and dissonance with Erik. Apart from some phase issues due to my poor microphone rigging skills I would say it is a great release. Erik’s performance and songwriting is pretty flawless to my ears. Perhaps I should have left the second song on the B-side off the tape and kept some song I scrapped. But I guess I have to live with that decision.
In a way I really miss having Erik in my life when I think about him, but some troubled souls are just catalysts for trouble and chaos. In a way Erik is, or at least was, one of those poor people.
After the release of the Erik Aschan tape, a year goes by during which Hibiskofon essentially falls silent, only to return in 2016 with what’s my second favourite release by the label: ‘Ur Törnedjupen’ by Swedish musical mastermind Wagner Ödegård (Wulkanaz, Tomhet, Karnilapakte, Draugsjukan, and a number of other brilliant projects). This tape was responsible for exposing me to Hibiskofon in the first place and so far it’s the only release by the label to be met with extensive reissues in the years that came.
I reached out to Wagner in early 2013 when he worked under the moniker of Semilanceata. Some year earlier I had stumbled across the Sfäraförintning LP by Tomhet [the actual full title is apparently “Fulländad Sfäraförintning I En Onaturliger Skepneskrud Av Pestilenta Djwr”… Yeah I know, ed.] and later on I was sent a few home-dubbed Semilanceata tapes. I instantly felt a kinship between his music and mine and I knew that I had to have some kind of creative or philosophical exchange with this person. Wagner is a brilliant musician and aesthete and I’ve had the chance to pick his brain apart for many years through our correspondence, trying to pick up clues about his composition methods and approach to creativity. We discussed concepts and paths regarding my own music, we delved deep into odd electronics and equipment, and we reflected on how to creatively apply these in production. I have learned a lot from him, and I think also he has learned a few tricks from me.
What really triggered a collaboration between the two can most likely be traced back to Jonsson’s decision to share his extensive sample library with Wagner. A vast set of crackles, surface noises and other audio artefacts to work with, but also samples from old poetry records and private field recordings that he had made over the years.
During the making of Ur Törnedjupen, Wagner would frequently send me snippets of his work and we would discuss them in detail and how things could progress from these. I came with a lot of feedback in the fields where I felt I had more experience than Wagner and let him roam free in the areas where he excelled.
His skills are the core ones like melody, songwriting and ambiance. My expertise lies in somewhat autistic areas like transitions, timing, and the use of vocal samples. My input were more like “linger an extra second or two between those passages, add some tape hiss to cover up the dead air and place a muted crackle just before the horns kick in” or “don’t use the whole sentence! Extract those three words and place the third one before the first two to add a strange poetic Yoda touch”. I just stepped in and gave advice on how to tighten up and create a greater tension in the sequencing of the tracks as well as making the vocal snippets more effective and suggestive. That turned the already great material into something that was a little bit more fluent and dramatic, heightening the overall experience a few notches.
It’s safe to say that, while Wagner is a brilliant musician in its own right, the tape would’ve most likely come out very different had Jonsson not given any input in how the sound and atmosphere should’ve been crafted.
[Ur Törnedjupen] is no doubt my favorite piece of the initial Wagner suite, just because it has that feel of being thoroughly worked through in most every detail. I would like to think I had a hand in that process and I’m honored to have had the opportunity of working alongside such a great and productive mind.
It’s been almost 7 years since the last anyone has heard from Hibiskofon, and the label seems to have gone largely silent since the release of Ur Törnedjupen. While I don’t want to question the reasons that made you decide to put the label on (hopefully temporary) hold, do you think there’s a future for both Hibiskofon and Tusen År Under Jord?
I really do not know whether I will go back to Hibiskofon or even start making music again. It is all a rather tedious and time-consuming process for me which demand a great deal of very focused time and effort. Not just in executing the work, but also in finding ideas and developing concepts. Family life has demanded most of my attention for the last 7 years, and it seem to keep doing so for the foreseeable future.
These 7 years have also been spent living in Sweden’s capital, and I have found life in a big city to be soul-crushing. This combination of day-to-day grind with no recovery and living in the cattle box suburb of a million people town has severely disenchanted my reality. And I do not use disenchanted in the mundane meaning of disappointment, but as in stripped of magic and depth. It is very hard to get any real and meaningful creative work done being cut off from a proper perspective of what I am actually doing. However, I would really like to someday find a way back into music.
In 2017, a new Tusen År Under Jord LP came out via German label Verlautbarung with a more exotic and percussive sound. It’s called “Sandhavens Genklang” and it’s Hortognome’s most recent work to date.
There is also a more trance-induced and ambient version of that music that awaits a release. It’s been in the hands of Wagner now for a while and there are plans to release it via Brugmanziah. He has a lot of other projects to tend to and since the release is no priority for neither me or Wagner I guess it could take a while before it reaches anybody’s ears.
Additionally, his attraction towards old recording methods and equipment has also helped him develop a rather peculiar interest in the subject.
I’ve spent the last 3+ years researching and writing about another dear interest of mine, namely vintage recording equipment and music electronics. The last 25 years that I spent building, rearranging and perfecting my home studio has led to a keen interest in old and odd equipment. It is a lot like looking for samples, the more you have rummaged around in the crates and the more records you have heard, the deeper you start digging after the real weird and unique stuff.
I spent about a decade tracking down and learning about old Soviet equipment as well as gear from other countries from behind the Iron Curtain. A few years ago, I also started to delve deeper into old Swedish manufacturers and, while I did end up finding some really obscure stuff, any historical documentation was either lost or impossible to find. That led me towards deciding to start tracking down the old geezers who once had built all the stuff in December 2019. I have been doing interviews as well as researching printed material in the Swedish National Library since then (as a side note, this institution is about the only big city privilege that I would miss in a small town).
The research and writing have been an effective compensation for the lack of music-making in my life. It is highly satisfying and when I am deep enough down the rabbit hole, I start noticing interesting synchronicities and connections. Not on the same scale as it used to be while I was making music, but I can still find a handful of brief glimpses into the intricate mesh of reality and how it constantly interconnects.
For now, this is enough to keep me rather happy and balanced, even sans music.